Consumers are taking ownership of brands, and their referral power is priceless.

The beauty of social media is that it will point out your company's flaws; the key questions is how quickly you address these flaws.

You're talking about a younger generation, Generation Y, whose interpersonal communication skills are different from Generation X. The younger generation is more comfortable saying something through a digital mechanism than even face to face.

As social media is less about technology and more about relationship building, we are starting to see more women have a heavy influence if not dominant role in the social media space. It's no wonder that Facebook is being run in part by chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg.

We don't have a choice on whether we DO social media, the question is how well we do it.

It had not yet been named Silicon Valley, but you had the defense industry, you had Hewlett-Packard. But you also had the counter-culture, the Bay Area. That entire brew came together in Steve Jobs.

Consumers are taking ownership of brands, and their referral power is priceless.